i talked with her about self, about the alter ego and about the collection of (alter) egos we call society. 

who are you when you are fully alone? free from any outer influence. do you even exist when no one is around to observe you? Meg knows a thing or two about being alone. in fact, she manages to present alone-time in such a way it sounds like the perfect holiday getaway.

about self

who is this other you have created? is it a guiding light, or a bolder version of you, uninhibited by shame or other self-sabotaging techniques? how does the alter ego mold the self? or is the self always in control, allbeit in subconscious ways?   

about alter ego

what happens at this universal tea party, when all alter egos unite? are we still true to our self? are we but a mere gathering of masks, keeping a safe distance in order not to shatter our delicate manmade appearance? how does one tame the family ties between the self, the alter ego and society? 

about society

camera david doom & murielle victorine scherre

"what is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is me,
me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,
adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,
not asking the sky to come down to my good will,
scattering it freely forever."

"beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!
make no parley—stop for no expostulation,
mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer,
mind not the old man beseeching the young man,
let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties,
make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses,
so strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow."

"are you the new person drawn toward me?
to begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;
do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
do you think it so easy to have me become your lover?
do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy’d satisfaction?
do you think I am trusty and faithful?
do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?
do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?
have you no thought, o dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?"

walt whitman

do you exist

face 4

face 5

face 6

face 7

do you exist if no one is around to experience you

my own self is deeply sad. i'm beginning to know that that's fine too.

i'm beginning to love my sadness

happiness is overrated

“there is room on this land for all of us and there must also be, after centuries of struggle, room for justice for Indigenous peoples. that is all we ask. and we will settle for nothing less.”

“watching today’s rapacious industrial development of the land by the western world is like watching a person with a serious mental illness causing self-harm.”

unsettling canada

“let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. what I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”

“I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. let us see who is the strongest.”

civil disobedience

I didn't know what I was

“birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.”

“awakening is not a thing. it is not a goal, not a concept. it is not something to be attained. it is a metamorphosis. if the caterpillar thinks about the butterfly it is to become, saying ‘and then I shall have wings and antennae,’ there will never be a butterfly. the caterpillar must accept its own disappearance in its transformation. when the marvelous butterfly takes wing, nothing of the caterpillar remains.”

“one becomes wise only in measures, as he goes through his own insanity.”

“although really society should not change, it should mutate. and, little by little, it is mutating. society is like the body of a chicken: the chicken's foot is hard and insensitive while the eye is very alive. and there are beings who embody the cells of the eyes and others who embody the cells of the feet, of the wings, or of the anus.”

“although often with good intentions, our parents and teachers attribute negative definitions to us, which last for many years and prevent us from developing ourselves with pleasure. in psychomagic, we call these definitions “labels” because they stick to the self. so that the consultant can free herself from them, I advise: the consultant writes on adhesive labels as many definitions as they gave her, for example: “you have no ear for music,” “you don’t know how to use your hands,” “you’re a freeloader, liar, thief,” “you’re egotistical, weak, dumb, fat, skinny, vain, ungrateful,” and so on. the consultant glues these labels to every part of the body— many of them to the face—and goes out in public that way for as many hours as possible. when the consultant returns home, she should remove the labels, roll them into a ball, take the ball to the city dump, and throw it on top of the garbage pile, having beforehand caressed her body with hands soaked in pleasant perfume.”

psychomagic

“no longer to be compelled to betray one's own feelings and senses, no longer to allow oneself to be deflected from the truth of facts by ideologies of any kind, is already to lend a hand in the demolition of the inhuman, destructive wall of silence—the wall that we were forced to respect as children and which has again and again resulted in fascist behavior.”

“to sign away our democratic rights to future tyrants and dictators, because they cast themselves in the role of "strong fathers," thus reminding us of our own, is tantamount to committing collective suicide. even if we have, since childhood, been waiting for the great, redeeming figure who will solve all our problems, as adults we can be aware that such a redeemer will, in reality, turn out to be something quite different. for it is more than likely that people who completely repress and falsify the mistreatment they once received will be a danger to others, a danger that increases the greater power they hold. this can be clearly illustrated by the lives of hitler, stalin, and countless of their followers. among them will not be found a single person who became a tormentor of others who did not approve of the abuse he himself once received.”

“the more familiar you become with your biography, the better you will have learned to perceive your internal signals and take them seriously, and the easier you can judge whether your therapists follow along with you and help you or whether they only serve to confuse you more. if you don't want to pay the bill for someone else's confusion, you must have the strength and the wisdom to give up a therapist or a confusing group as you would give up a mechanic who politely but blindly tried to fix your car while ignoring and wanting to ignore what was really wrong in the first place.”

breaking down the wall of silence

“there is no meaningful "yes" unless the individual could also have said "no.”

"if you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself."


"one does not become fully human painlessly."


"depression is the inability to construct a future."

power and innocence

I will be successful in death

cause im lost in thought

im currently trying to rewire

the ego can't accept that - you know - it will die

it's all in my head

"I wanted it not to be a victim narrative. I wanted it to be a taking stock of sort of all the things that had been erased and stolen from me as an indigenous woman..."

"this accident of being lost burns with a quiet intensity, like a campfire in your backyard, challenging you to reconsider the world you thought you knew."

this accident of being lost

alice

backwardsvox

strokes

it's getting better

"an attempt to respond to the need for deep and lasting social change in an epoch of dangerous crisis for all humans, cultures, and the planet."

"this book points to ways to re-create the connections, which have been severed, between the gift economy, women, and the economies of indigenous peoples, and to bring forward the gift paradigm as an approach to liberate us from the worldview of the market that is destroying life on the planet. shifting to a gift paradigm can give us the radically different worldview which will make another, better, world possible."

women and the gift economy

"raven told me you'd come around
said you had letters
making magic inside your crown"

hope matters

"white birds over the grey river.
scarlet flowers on the green hills.
I watch the spring go by and wonder
if I shall ever return home."

one hundred poems from the chinese

“there is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation.”

“the crows assert that a single crow could destroy the heavens. this is certainly true, but it proves nothing against the heavens, because heaven means precisely: the impossibility of crows.”

“you can withdraw from the sufferings of the world — that possibility is open to you and accords with your nature — but perhaps that withdrawal is the only suffering you might be able to avoid.”

aphorisms

"I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind his own business."

“I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things. anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.”

“I became alive once more. at the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. one evening a cousin of sasha, a young boy, took me aside. with a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway. it was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. my frivolity would only hurt the cause."

living my life

giorgio

gospelclaps

promnightloopfast

but they're not

both would be nice

sensitive

it's still sensitive

alter

resent

I resent the alter ego

“nothing disrupts dehumanization more quickly than inviting someone over, looking into their eyes, hearing their voice, and listening.”

“if a person cannot solve a conflict with a friend, how can they possibly contribute to larger efforts for peace? if we refuse to speak to a friend because we project our anxieties onto an email they wrote, how are we going to welcome refugees, immigrants, and the homeless into our communities? the values required for social repair are the same values required for personal repair.”

“the real question is: why would a person rather have an enemy than a conversation? why would they rather see themselves as harassed and transgressed instead of have a conversation that could reveal them as an equal participant in creating conflict? there should be a relief in discovering that one is not being persecuted, but actually, in the way we have misconstrued these responsibilities, sadly the relief is in confirming that one has been 'victimized'. it comes with the relieving abdication of responsibility.”

conflict is not abuse

let's do violence

the alter ego basically goes to work

witness

it's good for other people to witness

that's

what

celebrity

baby

ohw yes

I mean, that's what celebrity is!

over

L-over

mah two

imma gonna go the opposite

you know

you know, like

like

march

you know?

the self

it's all me, you know?

not to do

satisfaction

do not despair

I'm against that stuff

“I will tell you what jeanne was like. she was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.”

“she herself is a haunted house. she does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.”

“stars on our door, stars in our eyes, stars exploding in the bits of our brains where the common sense should have been.”

unicorn

"you know, you're only as free as the leash they keep you on. you tug hard enough, and they'll hang you with it."

jolly

“not that I want to be a god or a hero. just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.”

“in a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot.”

“learning to believe you are magnificent. and gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. enough labor for one human life.”

“you see how I try /
to reach with words / 
what matters most /
and how I fail.”

“what has no shadow has no strength to live.”

selected and last poems

i don't relate

suicide

marianne

gresysymphony

I'm pretty frustrated

"anyone who wonders why a tree giving us oxygen is only profitable when it’s cut
down, or why a train wreck increases the 'gross domestic product' but nurturing
children does not, is on the way to rejecting patriarchal capitalism. genevieve
vaughan and her collection of essays by activists and visionaries show us an alternate economic worldview that existed for most of human history, and could
exist again. this brave and path-breaking book will give you hope— and hope is
a form of planning.”

"the gift economy is prevalent in most ancient indigenous societies the world
over, many still existing today. gifting operates especially well among people
with fewer resources, in rural areas and urban townships. it is through sharing
gifts that many of us survive. genevieve vaughan’s feminist gift economy is a
reminder to all of us about this ancient practice still prevalent in many of our
societies, especially in africa and the global south more broadly, and her life’s
work in this area perfectly epitomizes the philosophies underpinning the book:
it is the gift economy in practice."

"this collection, in its critique of patriarchal capitalism and in its call for a logic of
gift-giving over exchange, makes possible a new understanding of —and appreciation for— the true economic and social value of mothering. in this, the book is
an invaluable contribution to motherhood studies."

“what if we choose not to do the things we are supposed to do? the principal gain is a sense of an authentic act – and an authentic life. it may be a short one, but it is an authentic one, and that's a lot better than those short lives full of boredom. the principal loss is security. another is respect from the community. but you gain the respect of another community, the one that is worth having the respect of.”

“sit in a room and read and read and read. and read the right books by the right people. your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.”

“you must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. this is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. this is the place of creative incubation. at first you may find that nothing happens there. but if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.”

“shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. and that’s what it is. the nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. when your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.

the inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. and the outer world is the field of your incarnation. that’s where you are. you’ve got to keep both going. as novalis said, 'the seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet'.”

“heaven and hell are within us and all the gods are within us. this is the great realization of the upanishads of india in the ninth century b.c.. all the gods, all the heavens, all the world, are within us. they are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. that is what myth is. myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other. this organ wants this, that organ wants that. the brain is one of the organs.”

myth and the body

“I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories... water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.”

“sometimes the one who is running from the life/death/life nature insists on thinking of love as a boon only. yet love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. we let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. passion dies and is brought back. pain is chased away and surfaces another time. to love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.”

“be wild; that is how to clear the river. the river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. the river does not dry up, we block it. if we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. that is creative life. it is made up of divine paradox. to create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.”

“the way to maintain one's connection to the wild is to ask yourself what it is that you want. this is the sorting of the seed from the dirt. one of the most important discriminations we can make in this matter is the difference between things that beckon to us and things that call from our souls.
nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the choice of mates and lovers. a lover cannot be chosen a la smorgasbord. a lover has to be chosen from soul-craving. to choose just because something mouthwatering stands before you will never satisfy the hunger of the soul-self. and that is what the intuition is for; it is the direct messenger of the soul.”

“when seeking guidance, don't ever listen to the tiny-hearted. be kind to them, heap them with blessing, cajole them, but do not follow their advice.”

“the psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying, being involved and being removed, questing and resting, creating and incubating, being of the world and returning to the soul-place.”

“there is a time in our lives, usually in mid-life, when a woman has to make a decision - possibly the most important psychic decision of her future life - and that is, whether to be bitter or not. women often come to this in their late thirties or early forties. they are at the point where they are full up to their ears with everything and they've "had it" and "the last straw has broken the camel's back" and they're "pissed off and pooped out." their dreams of their twenties may be lying in a crumple. there may be broken hearts, broken marriages, broken promises.”

meg remy aka U.S. GIRLS